Oracle Linux : Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)…

I mentioned in a previous post that my company were planning to move all of our middle tier infrastructure and some of our Oracle databases to Oracle Linux running on a virtual infrastructure. That process is now underway.

Persuading the company to ditch Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in favor of Oracle Linux took a bit of effort, partly due to some Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) spread by one of the vendors we use. In the process of trying to counter the FUD I put together an Oracle Linux FAQ document. I thought it might come in handy for anyone else in a similar position, so I thought I would make it available on my site.

As I say at the top of the article, this includes some of my opinions as well as facts. This made me a little nervous, so I thought I would run it by an expert before I let it loose. Big thanks to Lenz Grimmer for giving the article the once-over. His corrections and suggestions were very welcome!

Very useful FAQ! Had it been two weeks earlier it would have saved me half a day digging out the same info 😉

We are switching from Itanium HP-UX to x86-64 Linux and our U*x consultant stated “it is very worrying running on OEL as it is not supported by Tivoli backup, there is very little software available on the market compared to RHEL, and you’ll be locked to a commercial platform.”

So to ease the worries of our server guys I also had to dig out all the documentation showing that OEL can run any binary that runs on RHEL. We have now decided to use OEL 😀

We agree that at least Network Support to get patches and OEM management of OEL. We think for an enterprise system we most likely ought to get at least Basic Support as an insurance just in case we need to file an SR (even if it is unlikely to happen.)

But Premier Support is almost three times as expensive as Basic Support – is it also three times as much worth? Well probably it is if you have the need for it, but I think mostly it is KSplice that could be handy for us (we are “mostly” 24×7, but not really as it is usually possible to get a few hours servicewindow on sundays or in the night if we just warn a week ahead of time.)

I don’t have any direct experience of ksplice. It looks very cool and certainly a big plus for a 24×7 operation.

Regarding support, remember, you can have different levels for different environments. You could have Premier for your production environment to get ksplice, but then Network for everything else. I’ve heard people say they only buy support for production and have nothing for everything else. I guess you couldn’t use Ops Center on the non-licensed stuff, so that might be a problem if you use it.